User blog:Windyplains/Tournament Rewards
Some of the feedback I've received on tournaments throughout 2.5 was that the money made from betting during rounds is too much and the rewards earned from winning a tournament comes out to be too little. I agree on both counts and often have tried to limit my changes from being too "Floris specific" so that I don't make it overly difficult to port the tournament kit for common use. Since we had the opportunity for a 2.52 patch to Floris I thought I'd take a first stab at shifting this direction with the "bidding" system. So far according to the Floris 2.52 Polls it appears to be a relatively positive change, but as Ferodaktyl so stated it as "turned tournaments into a cash cow". The idea was that the kit would scale your payout based on how hard it was to acquire your bid. This was to ensure you were receiving a reasonable payback for taking a bid of 5 in a match where there is only 6 enemies to score against vs. taking a bid of 5 in a match with 24 enemies to score on. I still believe this was a good angle to take things, but I errored in not taking into account two important aspects. First, was the non-elimination based points like surviving a round that skewed the results on just how hard it was to acquire your bid in smaller matches. Second, was the fact that eliminating one opponent in a 4v8 match is harder than eliminating one opponent in a 4v2 match. Not only is that opponent more powerful, but you also have to watch out for other folks coming to attack you. What additionally skews this result is that I still required you to survive the round to earn your bet at all. My goal still remains the same. I want bidding to be a scaled bet that allows players to challenge themselves based on their own skill level. So if you are relatively new or low level you can take a safer bet, but if you really want to go for a higher bid (max: 10) and achieve that under great difficulty settings then you should receive a larger reward. The hope is to keep the system relevant even in the later stages of the game. So a few things changed to move towards this goal: * The difficulty slider ordering was changed to go by total number of hostile participants as opposed to total participants. This evens out the chart a bit. The 2.52 chart already has this change displayed or it would seem a bit less bell curve shaped. * The difficulty slider has a minor impact on how much money you make when developing the factor of "how many enemies vs. your bid" there is. This should prevent higher difficulty matches from being less worthwhile. * The main difficulty score now has a direct impact on how much you can make. This will serve as a major scaling factor on what you can earn from tournaments to keep things more interesting as you level up. The charts above are shown at 100% difficulty with a bid of 5 for reference sake. Additionally folks have not been happy with the item prizes. While a part of me feels these were an additional boon and were not meant to be the main reward, I see room for improvement as well. The initial intent of these prizes were for decking out your companions, not yourself, with better gear as you could always find a good masterwork item somewhere for yourself. Instead I am considering shifting the tournament prizes away from cash and more towards quality items. This would veer tournament rewards away from having as much of an economic impact and more of a game play one. So instead of earning as much direct cash for winning you might instead earn a tempered weapon or reinforced armor. I think that gives a more realistic approach to what might really have been offered to a tournament champion. Feel free to post your thoughts here and let me know what you think. Category:Dev Diary